Tag Archives: Civil War

It has been so many years since I taught in a school where the Pledge of Allegiance is a normal part of the morning procedures that can’t even remember how long it has been. This year the Pledge was made a part of daily morning announcements at my current school. I do not have a first period class; nonetheless, when the Pledge came over the intercom, I stood with my hand over my heart facing the flag in my empty room and pledged along with Mr. K who leads the school. The flag in my room is one that I purchased, because, just like so many other things, my school does not supply flags for classrooms. I think my room may be the only room in the school graced with the stars and stripes.

One day Mr. K was late getting to the announcements and so he delivered them during second period. I was taken by surprise and was in the middle of doing the drill. I scrambled to prepare the students and to give them quick instructions on my classroom policy. I admonished, “Here is my policy on the Pledge. You don’t have to stand or say the Pledge, but you must respect the moment and sit quietly while others pledge.” Mr. K started the Pledge; I stood with my hand on my heart and said it along with him, and not one — not ONE — student stood up with me.

When the Pledge was done, I looked at my students in disbelief. I said to the class that I was ashamed. I could not believe that not one student had enough pride in America to stand and say the pledge, but the more I thought about it I was not really surprised.

I completely respect someone’s right not to stand for the Pledge if he feels it goes against his beliefs. The freedom not to do such a thing is an important part of American freedoms. Actually, way back in 1973 when I was 12 years old, I alone in my class refuse to stand in protest of the Vietnam War. One wise teacher challenged me in way that I never forgot. He said that though he respected my right to refuse, he wondered if I actually understood exactly what I was protesting and whether I was sure I was making appropriate protest in response. I never forgot what he said and, after giving it some thought, I once again joined my classmates in stating the pledge.

In 1996, decades later, I remembered that intelligent encounter with that teacher when I had a few students who wouldn’t stand. I presented them the same challenge. One young man replied, “What has America ever done for me?” The first response that I gave to him was John Kennedy’s famous quote “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Then I told him that he should go visit many other countries of the world and he would realize that our poor are their middle class and their poor were always going to be poor unlike in America where a man like Ben Carson could go from dire poverty to being an extremely wealthy and nationally admired man. He would then discover what America had to offer him. His only response was to snort in disbelief.

My current group of students didn’t care at all; they didn’t even throw out a challenge like that young man from earlier in my career. They didn’t refuse to stand up, they just couldn’t be bothered. But it is even worse than that. The students that I teach have no American identity at all. In fact, for most of their school career they have been given a decidedly anti-American education. Common Core will continue that anti-American indoctrination nationally (as I will be further revealing in an upcoming article).

Many of my high school students can quote from Malcolm X, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; Plymouth Rock landed on us.”, but they couldn’t give you a single quote from a single U.S. president, not even from Obama. Neither can they tell you when the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, or any other war took place, why it was fought, or who it was fought against. They cannot say what is in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. Most of them do not even know that the Emancipation Proclamation was over 151 years ago and think that it happened only a few generations ago. Most of them cannot tell you the reason for celebrating the 4th of July, Veteran’s’ Day, or Memorial Day. They have no pride in being American, because no one has ever taught them why America is an exceptional nation and what freedoms and opportunities America affords them.

Instead, my students have been specifically taught that America has done nothing but cheat them. One of my students from Honduras insisted that all white people have five bedroom homes with two car garages. I told him that I had nonesuch and lived just up the street in a three bedroom row house in a neighborhood with many of my students. He refused to believe me. My students also believe that minorities are a majority of the country (I know, it is oxymoronic). When asked to estimate the percentage of African-Americans in the country, the answers that I get are 45% to 90%! My students have told me that life for African-Americans in this country just as bad as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. The national leaders of these minorities like Jackson and Sharpton and even the Clintons perpetuate these lies to stir up race hatred and keep us divided, while they line their own pockets with impunity.

America had better re-educate our children soon on why she is such an exceptional country. We must teach the real history of America, her failings and her successes. Currently, most urban students are only taught an exaggerated and biased analysis of her failings and only in relationship to their minority population giving a deeply skewed perception of what America really is. We must emphasize the opportunities America offers which are unique and exceptional. This is why so many want to come to this great land. We must embolden the rugged individual, unlike Obama who has declared him dead. We must once again instill a sense of pride in our country so that my students proudly stand with me, their fellow American, and voluntarily pledge allegiance to the United States of America.

Thanks for stopping by! What are your thoughts on the pledge? Consider commenting below. If you liked this article, please share it with a friend and on your social media stream of choice?

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Dana R. Casey is a veteran high school English teacher of more than two decades in an East-coast urban system. She is a life-long student of theology, philosophy, and politics, dedicated to the true Liberalism of the Enlightenment, as defined by our Founders and enshrined in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights. You can find out more about Dana over at http://www.candiddiscourse.com/.

We began each day with the Lord’s Prayer, standing quietly with bowed head, hands clasped in reverent respect. It’s a Christian prayer, of course, but back then the US was largely a Christian nation. Wait a second! We still are a Christian nation, no matter what the anticlerical, atheistic wing of the liberal social democrats say. In any case, The Lord’s Prayer is about as generic a prayer as one can find in the Christian liturgy and, said in the classroom in those days, it was meant to be broad-minded in the way America was broad-minded, open and welcoming. In fact, I believe that in almost every public school class room in the US back in those days of the early 50s, students always opened with the Lord’s Prayer and very few people minded it, questioned it or protested it.

Our teacher, in the combined third and fourth grade classroom, was Miss Alice Dufort, a lovely lady in her 40s, who was as gentle and kindhearted as any human being I have ever met. She was what we in those less sensitive days called an Old Maid, which meant that she had never married. She was a fine, much-honored citizen, for whom teaching was a vocation, a calling and not just a job. It was more than a profession. It was her life’s work, and she did it with dedication. Miss Dufort had a regular morning routine through which she led us in orderly fashion. After the Lord’s prayer, we recited the Pledge of Allegiance. She stood, her hand on her heart, and spoke the words with stirring devotion that was infectious and held us rapt.

After the prayer and the pledge, we stood and sang, first the National Anthem, then various patriotic songs by Irving Berlin, George M. Cohan and others. There was You’re a Grand Old Flag, God Bless America and a number of others, four or five in all. We sang them every day. I learned them by heart. To this day, when I hear them, I am cast back to those days in Miss Dufort’s classroom. After the singing, we sat while she read to us from some of her favorite children’s books. There was one called “Dan’s Boy” about an old man who adopts an orphan And another, whose title escapes me, about a child whose father fought in the Revolutionary War and who hid in a barn from the British while his father joined the ranks of militia men at Bunker Hill. I am from Massachusetts and the Revolutionary War was deeply important to us.

There was another book, too, about some little fellow called the Bee Man of Orne. For the life of me I can’t remember much about the stories in these books, but I remember well Miss Dufort reading them to us with such emotion that it moved us and gave us pleasure. Some stories, the short ones, she read whole, while others she read a chapter a day, like a serial at the movies on Saturday morning.

Only when all of this was done, did she proceed to teach us arithmetic, which she referred to as “number work,” then geography, which for Miss Dufort became the narrator of a running travelogue, which included descriptions of the natural resources and manufactured products of many nations and regions. I remember reading about the textile mills of the Merrimac Valley, the coal fields of West Virginia and the steel mills of Pittsburgh. We studied the geography of other countries, as well. Reading geography with Miss Dufort was like reading an adventure story, because she vivified the dull study of regional products and manufacturing with back stories and side tales she’d learned of people, many of whom she’d actually met, who came from all those exotic places we read about.

We studied history, too. But not only did we read about the French and Indian War, the Revolution, the War of 1812 and the Mexican, Civil and Spanish American wars and the great heroes from those fabled events. We learned about their meaning, because Miss Dufort was a keen observer of the meanings of things. She taught us how to understand the lessons of our country’s gloried history. But she taught us, too, about the terrible times, the sordid periods of slavery and the cruelties that attended it. And she praised Abraham Lincoln for emancipating the slaves and for keeping our nation whole in a time of terrible crisis and division, because we were “one nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” We read the Gettysburg Address, memorized it and often recited it in our morning routine, along with the prayer, the pledge, the songs and the stories, because it was more than just history. It was a vital part of our makeup as Americans.

Miss Dufort was not alone or unique in imbuing us with the spirit that, as Americans, we were a melting pot of grand scale. It was the essence of our being that the beacon of our nation, its freedom, its joy and its gorgeous plenty, were the magnet of a new civilization that made the individual the focus of rights, initiative and industry, along with personal responsibility to keep the lamp of liberty lit for the world to see. When, on what was then called Armistice Day, we recited In Flanders Fields, we did so knowing with certainty that the dead of that time and of generations before were dedicated to keeping that lamp lit in preserving not our greatness, but our freedom, for therein lay our greatness.

My wife is a teacher now in urban schools. She tells me of her experiences in the classroom and I fall back, agape at the ignorance of so many young people, at the arrogance of their ignorance, and of the outright contempt they too often hold for the great promise that is our country, forged on the anvil of enlightenment, and I long for those old days to return, when children were imbued with the real lessons of America, which seem nowadays not merely lost, but somehow thrown away.

Our country is being led down the primrose path by the specter of tyranny. But it is not the tyranny of the traditional, the tyranny of the old, the tried and the true. It is not the tyranny of the Founders’ ideas, which are being regularly cashiered by modern social engineering. It is the tyranny of the liberal left, who eschew the long fought and hard-won principles on which our nation was founded, their tyranny of lies which threaten our very way of life. It frightens and discourages me, and I wish Miss Dufort were here to teach those precious lessons once again to our children.

FJ Rocca is an independent, conservative writer/blogger of fiction and non-fiction, most interested in the philosophy of American conservatism. Clarity is more important than eloquence, but truth is vital to human discourse.

The simplest and most fundamental of elements in any sphere of knowledge seem to be the most difficult to explain. The fundamental may be basic, but it is also the foundation upon which more complex things rest upon. The atomic is difficult to qualify or quantify because qualities and quantities are based on those essentials. Most of us can’t imagine, for example, our classrooms without certain crucial tools like electricity, our computers, or that bottle of Tylenol taped to the bottom of our desks. We would like to introduce you to your next crucial tool…Enter: Aurasma (key dramatic music).

Aurasma is a game changing app for Apple and Droid products that we absolutely LOVE. Once you see it in action, ideas will fly out of you so quickly you may want to stop reading now and get something to write with. The complexity of its application is completely up to how much you want to integrate this app in your lessons. It is simple to use, but adds so much to your classroom experience.

Originally, Aurasma was developed as an advertising app to add POP to boring paper media advertisements. If you go to their “campaign” site you’ll see the various companies involved with this project. Because it was developed first in England, Aurasma is hitting its stride in Europe. Organizations like the Tottenham Hotspur and Mercedes are using this app to really hook customers. It has slowly been making its way into the United States. Recently, Marvel Comics, GQ, HP, and the Rolling Stones have incorporated this augmented reality app into their arsenal of marketing efforts.

Aurasma is a free app that allows the user to tag an image with additional layers of information. These additional layers can consist of audio, video, or image files. Just like the advertising efforts mentioned above, this app can really draw students into any upcoming or current lesson. For example, a poster of Abraham Lincoln can be brought to life by layering audio of the reading of the Gettysburg Address, a scene from a Civil War documentary, or a still image related to the Lincoln Presidency. At this point you may be thinking isn’t that what a “QR Code” does? Nope!

QR codes are disembodied portals to a destination. A QR code usually distracts from the image it is layered upon. Aurasma, however, IS the image. It allows the operator to use a picture, already useful and full of information, as the portal itself. This picture then leads to additional information, examples, or interactive documents (via Google Docs, to name one source) that continue the lesson or open it up to higher level prompts or assignments. A QR code is essentially limited to a single destination point. With an Aurasma “studio” account (free) you can layer a video on top of ol’ Honest Abe. Double tap the screen of your device while the video is playing to make it full screen. Then, with a single tap to the screen the app can send you to a second destination like another video, a website, or an educational platform like Moodle, Angel, or Blackboard (or your very own blog).

Watch this video to see the process in action.

There is only one minor limitation to this app from our experience. You must establish a “channel” and have other users follow you in order for outsider to have access to your “auras”. If you tag a political party’s logo with a video of how off-base their political views are, Aurasma will pull up only the tagged video you uploaded. This delivery system is similar to Twitter in the sense that you only get the messages from people you follow on Twitter. If multiple people or companies layer a video on that same image, only the videos of the channels you are following will appear. We’re not sure what happens when multiple channels tag a single image with their own videos, but up to this point, this has not been an issue.

We have incorporated the many uses of Aurasma into a bulletin board that demonstrates its power. We used Bloom’s Taxonomy as our frame and attached multiple examples from various disciplines. So, if you are a newcomer to technology in the classroom use Aurasma on Bloom’s Knowledge Level, but if you’re a pro looking to put some pop in your lessons you may want to use Aurasma to target Bloom’s Synthesis Level.

There are two options when creating auras via Aurasma. You can create and store them in the “private” section or the “public” section. You will find below instructions for making a “public” aura. Auras must be public and connected to a channel students are subscribed to for classroom use.

Once you download Aurasma (for free) and register it. You will press the “A” icon at the bottom of the screen.

You will see a “+” icon at the bottom of this screen. Press this to create a new aura.

There is a library of preloaded 3-d images and videos you can use or you can create your own. Let’s assume you want to create your own. So, next press “device”.

In the upper left hand corner you’ll see a large purple “+”. Press that.

You can take a new video or image by choosing “Camera”, you can upload a previously taken image or video by choosing “photo album”, or you can upload images or videos from the internet by choosing “blinkx”. Just for brevities sake, let’s choose a still image you already have on your device. Press “photo album”.

Once you pick your image or video, you will be given the option to name it.

You will then be prompted with the question “Would you like to create an Aura?” Choose “ok”.

The “Aura” screen will appear. The next image you capture will be your “trigger image”. When Aurasma sees this image, your overlay will appear. So find something around you that has enough detail for the spectrum indicator at the bottom to move to the “green” side. This lets you know that Aurasma can “see” it.

Take the picture and Aurasma will give you a preview of your final product. Push the “>” button to move on.

Name your project. You have the choice to make it public or private here as well as whether you want to add it to a channel or not. Remember, channels are how your followers will access your “Auras”, otherwise these are accessible only to you on your device. For classroom use, choose “public” and add to your classroom channel.

Finally, Aurasma will let you know when your “Aura” is ready to go! All that is left is to try out your new Aura.

Follow our pre-established channels to see some examples of this in action. First, in Aurasma, search for and follow Northwest High School, #CoopGovt, and Compher Social Sciences channels. Next, follow this link to our list of images that will then trigger the overlays (don’t forget; double tap the screen to make the video larger and single tap to go to the next part of the assignment).